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It’s been more than two years since the Mount Vernon schools fired teacher John Freshwater for
persistently injecting his religious views into his eighth-grade science classes.

Two lower courts have rejected his appeals for reinstatement. On Wednesday, the Ohio Supreme
Court will hear oral arguments in the case that could determine whether he returns to public
education.

The court agreed 4-3 to review the case on two of Freshwater’s basic claims: that the district
did not clearly tell him which materials or teaching methods were acceptable and that the
Constitution protects free speech in the classroom.

Rita Dunaway will have 15 minutes to defend Freshwater. She’s an attorney for the Virginia-based
Rutherford Institute, which supports human-rights and civil-liberties cases.

He was a victim of a “religion-phobic” school board, Dunaway said last week.

His administrative hearing, which cost the school district more than $900,000, was flawed
because the hearing referee “deferred to the so-called impartial investigators,” she said. “If you
start from a flawed investigation, it absolutely taints everything that followed.”

The hearing’s state-appointed referee concluded that Freshwater was “determined to inject his
personal religious beliefs into his plan and pattern of instructing his students.”

State high courts generally are reluctant to reverse school-board decisions when they involve
zero-tolerance cases and civil-liberties violations, Dunaway said.

“They like to give them free rein. They see school boards as being responsive to the political
process — they are elected by the people.”

Dunaway will argue, in part, that Bible verses displayed in Freshwater’s classroom were “
motivational,” and that all teachers should have the freedom to share their personal views, as long
as they also fairly present state-required subject matter.

She said the school district was unclear about permissible classroom activities, and that
Freshwater did nothing more than encourage his students to think freely. “To say that to question
evolutionary theory is to indoctrinate religion is just wrong,” Dunaway said.

The board concluded that Freshwater shared religious materials, including a Ten Commandments
poster and a creationist handout with students. That violated the First Amendment prohibition
against the state’s establishing a religion, the district says, and went against direct orders
given to Freshwater to stop.

Attorneys for the Mount Vernon Board of Education argue that teachers relinquish their freedom
to speak as a private citizen.

“Like it or not, Freshwater takes on the mantle of the board, and his teaching becomes
government speech,” according to court briefs.

The Ohio School Boards Association is closely following the case.

“Whatever the decision is, then we will have some guidance and certainty on what to tell our
districts,” said Hollie Reedy, the association’s chief legal counsel.

Freshwater’s termination hearing called dozens of witnesses and generated 6,000 pages of
transcript over almost two years.

Freshwater, 56, has said he has spent much of his life savings on his legal defense, including
proceeds of the sale of his Mount Vernon farm to a former student. The Rutherford Institute is now
representing him at no cost.

Dunaway said Freshwater has had at least one teaching job at a private school since he was fired
in January 2011.

Freshwater asked administrators whether he could teach “the alleged controversy surrounding
evolution” in 2003 but was denied. According to evidence from his administrative hearing, he did so
anyway until 2008, when parents complained to a principal, who ordered him to stop and to remove a
Bible from his classroom desk.